UNITED NATIONS, New York — The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court plans to indict suspects for atrocities in Darfur by February, nearly two years after the UN Security Council asked him to investigate the Sudan region.

The prosecutor, Luis Moreno- Ocampo, in a report released ahead of his address on Thursday to the council, said his office was preparing submissions for arrest warrants to judges of the pretrial chamber of the international court.

"We are planning to complete this work no later than February," said Moreno-Ocampo, an Argentine.

Arrest warrants are equivalent to indictments at the international court, based in The Hague.

Moreno-Ocampo said that since the start of the investigation, his team had carried out more than 70 missions to 17 different countries and conducted more than 100 interviews, many of them with victims of crimes committed in Darfur.

Evidence included rape, torture, willful murder, sexual violence and torture in Darfur, where at least 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million have been displaced in fighting among rebels and government forces since 2003.

The international court can only prosecute suspects when national courts have failed to do so. Moreno-Ocampo said that Sudan so far had not conducted trials for the most serious crimes and "those who bear the greatest responsibility for those crimes."

But he said he was traveling to Sudan again in January to get information on the arrest of 14 people accused of crimes in Darfur.

Louise Arbour, the UN high commissioner for human rights, organized an investigation in Darfur two years ago and came up with a list of suspects, including Sudanese officials, and military and rebel leaders. Moreno-Ocampo said her evidence had been preserved.

Since Moreno-Ocampo organized his staff in 2003, he has indicted four leaders of Uganda's brutal Lord's Resistance Army and one Congolese, the only one arrested.

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But some of the court's most ardent supporters voiced concern at a meeting last month that Moreno-Ocampo was treading too carefully and could undermine a dream of a permanent tribunal, under discussion since the Nazi trials at Nuremberg at the end of World War II.

In the case of Sudan, it would be nearly impossible to arrest the perpetrators, unless the government did so.

But Richard Dicker, director of the international justice program of Human Rights Watch, said an arrest warrant by itself served as a powerful warning.

"The impact, the stigmatization of charges, is no small thing," he said. "Branding suspects as a charged war criminal has a major effect on their legitimacy."

Dicker said that while it was "shameful" that Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were never arrested for war crimes in Bosnia despite charges by a special UN court, the indictments had served a purpose.

"They marginalized them as political actors in the former Yugoslavia," Dicker said. "They stripped them of political legitimacy."

The Bush administration has strongly objected to the court, fearing frivolous politically motivated indictments, which have not occurred. Russia too had worries — it signed the statutes but did not ratify them. China never signed.

"We are prosecutors enforcing a law that has no consensus," Moreno- Ocampo told the meeting of advocacy and human rights groups last month.